Distractions
At the workplace, employees or customers can be distracted for various reasons. Indeed, within a customer setting, there are several disturbances for instance, chatty co-workers or gossipers are the first forms of distraction (Tiutiunnikov, 2018). These are the colleagues who leave their working section and move to their fellow employees’ station to chat. Phone usage, especially calls and messages, is another form of diversion during work. Furthermore, customers could be a source of distraction especially when they make noise, thus, interrupting the office silence. Social media browsing can also make service providers or customers get distracted (Tiutiunnikov, 2018).
Visiting social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram might become employees’ or customers’ diversion thus they pay less attention to what they are doing. Other types of interruptions include meetings, multitasking, and email activities among others.
Elimination Strategies
There are many strategies to solve workplace distraction and below are the three of them. Setting social time aside may help prevent employees from making social contacts during work time (Lapis, 2017). Social time could be included in the breaks, especially lunch breaks, whereby the employers might be added more time after meals for socializing. Another way to eliminate interruption is to put work first by focusing on a goal. Employers may set a target for every employee and workers could leave phones in their changing rooms. Customers might also avoid using their phones when shopping or having service providers attend to them (Mark et al., 2017).
Lastly, to prevent meetings diversions, the management could allocate them in less busy hours of the workdays or minimize disruption by sending direct messages to workers for the less important information. This way, they reduce meeting time and the employees focus more on work.
References
Lapis, P. (2017). One marshmallow, or two? How to overcome workplace distractions. PROCTOR, 37(4), 42-49. Web.
Mark, G., Iqbal, S., & Czerwinski, M. (2017). How blocking distractions affects workplace focus and productivity. ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers 1, 928-934. Web.
Tiutiunnikov, L. (2018). Distractions in the office environment of start-up companies. Web.